AN ODD NEW EPISODE OF South Park began floating around Twitter last summer. The characters and setting looked familiar, and the voices were almost right, but something was slightly off. In the episode, Eric Cartman is disappointed that Hollywood actors have gone on strike. He creates a deepfake app that can put any actor's likeness into any movie and, with a friend, pitches it to Marc Andreessen. They also attempt to recruit Harrison Ford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise, only to discover the actors are heading to Mars with Elon Musk.
The mini-episode was not made by the creators but by a company called Fable Simulation, which lifted assets from the longrunning animated series to showcase its new generative AI tool. Called Showrunner AI, it can write, direct, edit, and voice episodes of a show with just a little prompting. Unsurprisingly, there was a mixed reaction to the demo, which came out just a few weeks after the Screen Actors Guild and the Writers Guild of America (WGA) went
